A truth teller, scribe and manic rambler living with Depression, BPD and PTSD while picking up the pieces of my beautiful Bipolar life. My scars don't define me. It's the grace (sometimes), and gratitude (always) in which I handle my chaos that does. Welcome to my messy, amazing life!

Sunday, July 31, 2011

How much do you love me?

Today, I am reminded of how fragile we all are. Each one of us, as humans, is just one wrong word, one misunderstood intention, one projected feeling away from having the wall come crashing down around us. I have spent my entire life trying to figure out this whole "love" thing. When someone has been emotionally abandoned early in life, it is hard to determine what is real, who can really be trusted and how far you must go to protect yourself. I find myself telling my children that the only person they can ever count on is first themselves and in the same instance then their God. Yet, by saying this, am I telling them inadvertently or without any conscience that they can't count on me? Or what about their future spouse, or their own children thereafter... And when I am talking about who to "count on", am I talking about love, trust, security, sense of self? Maybe all of that or none of that. I am still very much confused on this one. It is my hope that when this is finished I will have found my answer.

This is what I know. There are parts of me that I love. But, there are more parts that I don't even like, nor do I understand. I often feel like I am a player in some badly written Lifetime movie of the week. I keep waiting for that "hollywood moment" to appear and make everything right again. This drives my husband crazy as he knows he is expected to be the one to swoop in and "fix" it, yet 9 out of 10 times he has no idea what went wrong or where even to begin. When we met, he was my "leading man", he somehow created these moments in the middle of complete chaos (this will be addressed in later posts) and set things right with my heart in a way that I had never experienced. This is what I fell in love with. Or at least what I thought love was at the time. Yet as we grew, as things changed, as the chaos became more and more distant, I find myself still waiting for that "white horse" to sweep me away and well I guess he is waiting for me to just believe in those "moments" without anything having to happen that requires him to prove himself.

And so this crazy cycle continues with me desperately seeking his love and him desperately seeking my approval. When does it end? Well for starters, I think it ends when you love yourself enough that you are not waiting for someone else to fill you up anymore. Jerry Maguire had it all wrong with the whole "you complete me" bullshit. No one can complete you. By the same token, you can't break anything that wasn't whole to begin with. So, today, I find myself recommitting to my task of filling myself with as much love as is required for just my own happiness. And with some positive energy and a little divine intervention my happiness will make everyone around me happy in turn. And just maybe when my husband calls for me to watch some funny video he sees on Facebook, or when he gets up early on his day off and mows the lawn, or when he asks me if I want the rest of the hash browns before eating them, I will be able to see that as my "leading man" he is loving me in the best way he knows how. By thinking of what makes me laugh, how much it bothers me when the grass gets too tall and just how much I, in fact, LOVE hash browns, he is showing me that he loves me in every single insignificant moment of every single day.

And, if I can be confident in that and love myself as much as he loves me, then those super "hollywood moments", will occasionally find their way into our lives, but they will not be what I "count on" for completeness, they will be what runneth over my already full cup.